Fridays

On Monday I wake up. Get breakfast done. Wake up the children. Wash
them. Help them getting dressed. Make sure they eat to the last
cornflake on heir bawls. Take them to school. Come back home. Clean the
house (every day I concentrate a little bit more in a different area).
Start cooking dinner. Go shopping (if needed). If shopping is out of
the question, I normally go out to have a quick coffee with my friends.
All mums from the area. Then we all go to pick up our kids. Come back
home. Give them dinner. An hour or so of games or television all
together. At last I make them go to bed. And finally I get the only
time of the day that is truly mine? I sit on the sofa, in front of the
telly, planning what to do with those precious moments. Normally I just
fall asleep trying to decide, and wake up with a terrible pain in my
neck.

On Tuesday I wake up. . Get breakfast done. Wake up the children. Wash
them. Help them getting dressed. Make sure they eat to the last
cornflake on heir bawls. Take them to school. Come back home. Clean the
house (every day I concentrate a little bit more in a different area).
Start cooking dinner. Go shopping (if needed). If shopping is out of
the question, I normally go out to have a quick coffee with my friends.
All mums from the area. Then we all go to pick up our kids. Come back
home. Give them dinner. An hour or so of games or television all
together. At last I make them go to bed. And finally I get the only
time of the day that is truly mine? I sit on the sofa, in front of the
telly, planning what to do with those precious minutes. Normally I just
fall asleep trying to decide, and wake up with a terrible pain in my
neck.

I won't go on. I'm sure you got the picture by now. But Fridays are
different, on Fridays a bus and a train journey will take me to "the
office" after dropping the kids.

"The office" is an old flat, in a very common block of flats, in a nice
secluded area.
Nobody lives in "the office", but there is a bed.
Nobody prepares meals, but there is a kitchen.
There are not computers, or printers, or typing machines.
Where I work on Fridays, there are condoms and tissues instead of paper
and staples. A big mirror on top of the bed instead of a screen?

I never chose to do it in the first place. Chained to that radiator in
central London.
I had arrived to England through a "friend of the family", from Poland,
my homeland.
It had cost me all my savings. This man had promised me a job, a lot of
friends, and a life of luxury and commodities.
Instead he locked me naked in a bedroom where a lot of men used me as a
tissue, and then discarded me. I didn't even get to know their names.
Let alone receive any money from them.
One morning when I was allowed to the toilet, I left, undressed. I
escaped, shocked by fear. I didn't care for anything, just to run away,
far?
A taxi driver was kind enough to stop and help me. He took me to the
flat of a girl I had met in the journey to the UK. She had given me her
address before saying our good byes and good lucks, and somehow it had
stick to my brain. She was my guardian angel, till I learned in this
world there are no guardian angels at all.

But now I have a family, and a home, and Mondays and Tuesdays and
Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and Saturdays and Sundays again.